2026 BRAIN INITIATIVE PHOTO & VIDEO CONTEST

Winners will be announced on August 13, 2026!

The Little Neuron That Could

The retrosplenial cortex is a brain region important for spatial orientation, fear processing, and imagining oneself in the future. The small neuron shown in the middle is unique to this brain region and can fire at high rates. For this reason, the student who identified this neuron liked to call it "the little neuron that could". This neuron receives inputs from head direction cells in the thalamus (shown in blue), unlike its neighboring, more standard neurons (shown above and below it). Thus, this neuron is uniquely positioned to compute spatial orientation information.

AAV9-Mediated GFP Expression in the Mouse Olfactory Bulb

AAV9-GFP was injected into the olfactory bulb of a 7-week-old C57BL/6 mouse to assess transduction efficiency. Brain sections were sectioned at 30 uM. Sections were stained by immunofluorescent-immunohistochemistry (IHC-IF) to visualize transgene expression (GFP, green), neurons (NeuN, red), and nuclei (DAPI, blue). Image acquired at 10x magnification on a Zeiss Axioscan 7 slide scanner.

Motor Commands - Brainstem Circuit of the Larval Zebrafish

Under a custom built 2-photon microscope, larval zebrafish were imaged to combine expression of pan-neuronal GCaMP for calcium imaging with back labeling of brainstem neurons involved in motor control. A full z-stack was filtered in ImageJ using hyper stack depth color coding, from the dorsal to ventral view in the midbrain and medulla. The micrograph shows a colorful arrangement of the nucleus of the medial longitudinal fasciculus and reticulospinal neurons. This image highlights the necessary circuits for behavioral adaption to environmental cues in zebrafish.

The Blue (and Green) Print of Memory

This coronal cross-section of the rodent brain seen via fluorescence imaging reveals the intricate architecture of the hippocampus and its surrounding cortical and sub-cortical structures. These are regions crucial for memory, learning, spatial navigation, and emotional regulation, and imaged as here, they serve as a map of the living experience.

1000 Largest Neurons in the Drosophila Connectome

This visualization captures the 1,000 largest neurons in the fruit fly central nervous system, offering a comprehensive view by sampling neurons across all functional regions.

Circuit Fingerprints of DBS Response

This image reveals why identical targets can produce unequal outcomes in deep brain stimulation. By mapping patient-specific stimulation fields onto a high-definition tract atlas, DBS becomes a window into the circuits that shape recovery. The responder shows broad engagement of motor and basal-ganglia pathways, while the non-responder shows a restricted fingerprint. The contrast reframes variability not as noise but as a map for precision circuit therapy and future individualized neuromodulation, where stimulation is guided by pathways, not anatomy alone, and symptoms lead us to circuits too.

A Neural Signature of Affective Pain

Intracranial EEG recordings reveal changes in the aperiodic exponent across cortical and subcortical networks tracking affective pain symptoms in a patient with refractory chronic pain. Encoding is distributed across both cortical and subcortical regions but lateralized to the right hemisphere, including the right anterior and posterior insula and right midcingulate cortex.

Neural Enlightenment: Restoring Cognition Through Thalamic DBS

Ten years ago, the first traumatic brain injury (TBI) patient was implanted with deep brain stimulation (DBS) in thalamus to treat executive function impairment. When asked if she was ready for stimulation, she responded with “light me up!” To date, executive function has been successfully restored in five TBI patients using thalamic DBS. This video demonstrates the modeling of thalamic fibers stimulated during effective therapy in these patients.

High-Speed Photoacoustic Microscopy for Real-Time Functional Brain Imaging

This video demonstrates high-speed photoacoustic microscopy for functional brain imaging in awake mice. Real-time changes in cerebral blood perfusion and oxygen saturation are visualized through a cranial window. Red indicates highly oxygenated blood, while blue represents lower oxygen saturation. The hemodynamic response to whisker stimulation provides an indirect measure of neuronal activation.

Behavioral Clusters in the Drosophila BANC Connectome

A tour through the brain and nerve cord connectome (BANC), revealing what it has taught scientists about the organization of sensory-motor circuits, across a whole central nervous system. The most extensive connectome to date!

Multimodal Alignments of Functional Activity, Transcriptomics, and Projectomics of the Same Cell

Example TRU-FACT (Total Registration Under Functional Activity, Connectivity, and Transcriptomics) alignments of in vivo neural Ca2+ activity and spatial transcriptomic data, using conventional, mesoscope, GRIN microlens-based, or miniature two-photon microscopy in awake mice, together with either HCR-FISH or MERFISH. For multiscale studies of structure-function relationships, TRU-FACT enables routine and scalable multimodal investigations of the same cells by providing a broadly applicable experimental and computational pipeline for image alignment and cell registration.

Optical Reconstruction of Brain Circuitry

Reconstruction of a sparse set of neurons across 10 million cubic microns of mouse hippocampus using E11 Bio’s PRISM technology. PRISM combines protein barcoding, expansion microscopy, multiplex antibody staining, optical imaging, and advanced machine learning to accelerate proofreading for neuronal reconstruction. Molecular information, such as synapses, can be imaged in the same platform in addition to neuronal architecture, providing a novel and scalable approach to connectomics.